Posted on by mwhybark

The Pepper Tree

In the earlier post referencing a photo-log of my commute, I expressed grumpiness that the captions of the images failed to properly appear in Gallery.

One reason is that the interesting tree seen here was not annotated.

It’s a Brazilian pepper tree, a problem plant in Florida.

The tree is just behind the Canal Boiler Works but probably not on the same lot.

How did this tree arrive? Originally, I had thought that it might be a ghost plant, a tree that survived the twentieth-century building boom that erected the industrial flats of the SoDo region. In some of the city’s older residential neighborhoods, five-house city blocks were platted from larger, older farms that had served a generation at most. Fruit trees sometimes survive in the interior of these blocks, a ghost of the prior use of the land. The trees may well have been planted by the home’s first tenants, too, I acknowledge.

The gnarled but fruited limbs of these trees are a signature of Seattle’s pre-World War II housing developments. I feel a strong affection for these trees, visualizing them as arboreal grandmothers, their knotted limbs extended each summer with sweet snacks for we monkeykin.

Alas, given that the pepper tree is a fast grower, my hopeful rumination is unlikely in this case.

Of course, it begs the question, regarding the Boiler Works, “Where is the Canal?”

Posted on by mwhybark

Chers blogeurs et blogeuses

We’s a gwine ter have a wing ding hyar, an RL peeps is a comin’. Summ a youse wot mebbe mought wanna come, youse is inviteried. Puh-leeze to email me and ah’ll hep yez ter the haps, gatesters. Dig?

Posted on by mwhybark

Hi ho

Although there is a bus ride in the middle, here are the things I see every day on my way to work. Yesterday morning, though, there was an added attraction: the burned-out remnants of Hillcrest Market.

A walk to work.

(Grumble. The captions didn’t come over from iPhoto and I’m out of steam.)

Posted on by mwhybark

¡Hasta La Victoria!

Today was an insanely busy day. Errand after errand. Luckily, we were able to meet up with Spence for dinner and finally catch F 9/11, which stood up. It was like hearing an impassioned argument. It’s worth seeing, and on the way home, Viv was saying how she wished she could get her Cuban-emigré parents to see it. She heated up a bit and blurted out, “Bush is like Castro!”

Now, I have to say that made me pause in confusion for a moment. But the underlying idea, of comparing President Bush to a long-reviled bugaboo of the right, is one that probably should be explored. It might get the big idea across. The idea that President Bush and his administration are a threat to America and the Constitution, that when they say “freedom” and “democracy” they mean “control” and “security state,” well, if I compare them to certain other well known right-wing despots of the twentieth century, the discussion is over.

But comparing him to despots of the left, now that’s an idea that just might bear fruit!

Posted on by mwhybark

droopy

I’m a bit sozzled with sleepiness.

Viv and I went to the Museum of Flight to see the new wing, and ogle the flying antiques.

After years of hunting, I found a NASA cap, to replace one lost to sleep-deprivation during the dotcom era. The new cap’s OK, but I still miss the old one, which was better made.

As always, I was as interested in the techniques used in presenting the artifacts in the exhibit as I was in the artifacts themselves. One interesting aspect of the expansive WWI collection is the high percentage of reproductions on display. Sadly, there was no rollup to show me the sums, but I’m sure I’ll work it out eventually.

The only well-known plane that did not appear in the WWI gallery that I noted as missing off the top of my head was the Nieuport 17. However, a Nieuport 24 and a Nieuport 27 were both featured.

Here is the complete list.

Posted on by mwhybark

American Girl

A day or two ago I somehow happened to hear a song that was unfamiliar to me but obviously by Tom Petty, which included the lyric

She grew up in an Indiana town,
Had a good-lookin’ mama who never was around.
But she grew up tall and she grew up right
With them Indiana boys on them Indiana nights

I idly wondered, ‘Huh, is that Tom Petty? Why is he singing about Indiana?’

Now, and I know this may come as a shock, I don’t listen to much contemporary commercial radio, talk, music, or otherwise, so I had no idea that Mary Jane’s Last Dance was a 1994 top ten hit for the blonde, reedy-voiced singer.

The song finished with an Indianapolis-specific lyric:

There’s pigeons down in Market Square
She’s standin’ in her underwear
Lookin’ down from a hotel room
Nightfall will be comin’ soon

Market Square, per se, may not exist. But Market Square Arena was Indiana’s largest venue for touring rock bands, one that Petty has surely played dozens of times since his late-seventies emergence in American rock. When I heard this lyric, I (mis?)understood it to describe the titular Mary Jane as a billboard model on the Arena’s banners, observed by the narrator as he looks down from his hotel room.

The Indiana references puzzled me, and the song reminded me of another song by Petty. Once again, I encountered this song in anomalous way – I learned how to play it with some friends years ago, and had no idea who it was by or what the original sounded like. All I knew was that it was a seventies rock number. My disinterest in the genre prevented me from exploring it further for some time.

Well she was an American girl raised on promises
She couldn’t help thinking that there was
little more to life somewhere else
After all it was a great big world with lots of places to run to
And if she had to die trying she had one little promise she was gonna keep

American Girl is from Petty’s first LP, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, released in 1976. Breakdown is probably the best-known song on that album.

At any rate, these fragments were clacking around in my head when we went to see Spiderman 2 yesterday. the film opens with a slow zoom out from, um, well…

A giant billboard photo of a model named Mary Jane.

This started to give me the willies, a wee bit, and so I’ve spent part of today treading Googlefluid in an attempt to answer some questions. In the excercise I have also learned some interesting things, the most tasty of which is that American Girl was written twenty-eight years ago today, July 4, 1976. The same source, a University of Florida student newspaper, reports that the narrative of American Girl (which involves a woman standing on a high balcony with unclear thoughts of dissatisfaction in her head) is probably not based on a supposedly-true incident of dorm-building suicide.

Why Florida? Well, Petty is from Florida and California. Which begs my original question, why Indiana?

This is a question I believe will simply go unanswered. This page collects some anecdotes about the song, including the tidbit that Mary Jane’s Last Dance was originally titled Indiana Girl, but otherwise sheds no light on the subject.

In my own mind the singer is certainly linked with my experience of the state in which I mostly grew up. It’s fair to say I was one of those Indiana boys in the Indiana night, if possibly not the Skoal-cap variety the lyric may call to mind. I’ve done my fair share of skinny-dipping in quarries as the midsummer night sounds thickened the humid, still air. I certainly hope I did my bit to help some Indiana girls grow up fast and grow up right. Discretion here draws the curtains on this pastoral.

I should clarify. Petty’s role in my Indiana youth was not to illuminate or romanticize the ways of youth, but rather to serve as a somewhat baffling weapon of ostracism. The particular lyric is from 1980’s Damn the Torpedoes. The album’s hits were Don’t Do Me Like That and Refugee.

In Refugee, Petty sings

Somewhere, somehow,
Somebody must have kicked you around some.
Who knows why you wanna lay there and revel in your abandon.

It don’t make no difference to me, baby,
Everybody’s had to fight to be free,
You see you don’t have to live like a refugee.

After I returned from living abroad for a year, drastically changed in appearance, some of the redneck students in my high school determined that this song encapsulated something about me, in their eyes. They dubbed me “Refugee,” and I was greeted with it as some sort of taunt for a period of time. I still don’t get it.

Somewhere, somehow,
Somebody must have kicked you around some.
Who knows? Maybe you were kidnapped,
Tied up, taken away, and held for ransom.

It don’t really matter to me, baby,
Everybody’s had to fight to be free,
You see you don’t have to live like a refugee.

Were they threatening me? I think, in fact, that this was the intended implication, as repeated violent encounters with members of this group of kids marked my entire high school experience.

If that is indeed the case, I can only savor the inverted meaning. I am threatened with violent enforcement of some sort of social or behavioral code, presumably because I am ‘acting like a refugee.’ The enaction of this violent corrective would involve ‘someone kicking me around some,’ which in the song prompts the problematic behavior. I could only conclude that I was to be encouraged in my deviance.

This campaign culminated in one particularly spectacular beating. It ended when an on-site police officer tackled the much larger goon who was happily engaged in pounding my face into mush against the ground. That event concluded with me holding the goon’s sister in my arms and comforting her as she wailed, because her brother had been arrested (again) and would certainly have to go to jail. Later I learned, unsurprisingly, that said goon had the whuppin’ kind of Daddy.

So in my mind, Petty’s work is associated with a particularly American kind of pointless, inherited violence, self-loathing expressed as a kind of xenophobia. It’s not the artist’s fault, and I have to say, it’s barely the goon’s. But I surely do see it as a deeply embedded part of Hoosier and American character.

Well it was kinda cold that night
She stood alone on her balcony
Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by
Out on 441 like waves crashin’ on the beach
And for one desperate moment
There he crept back in her memory
God it’s so painful when something that’s so close
Is still so far out of reach

Oh yeah, all right
Take it easy, baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl

Posted on by mwhybark

54 Buick P-40 Special

DCP_7964.sized

As we drove south on Chuckanut Drive, overlooking the waters that hold the San Juans, we came across this lovely militarian art car, lableled in stencil on the trunk “54 Buick Special P-40.”

The car also featured what I’d have to describe as ‘tail art,‘ and a front-facing fifty-caliber machine gun in the back seat, not clearly visible in my picture. Also not visible in my pix are the detailed additional rivets added to the skin of the car to make it look more like a vintage warbird.

Oddly, a year ago, on Chuckanut, I also photographed an extreme militarian conversion of a Porsche 911 4×4, this one without apparent armament, although shrunken heads were noted.

Posted on by mwhybark

Two Bells and Three Men

I just returned from a beer-up at the Two Bells with Messrs. Harpel and Elope.

We had a pleasant evening in which I learned that “no one cares about my sandwich,” notwithstanding the fact of my munching Crab Louie whilst my compadres consumed burgerfleisch. Kaycee Nicole was likened to A Rape in Cyberspace.

Tom regaled us with tales of his interesting, absent father, the key image of which is said progenitor presenting the preadolescent Tom with a bag of gold coins, and Dan reminded me of one of the reasons to avoid drinking gallons of instant ice tea.

On the way home, we noticed that half of the Sit-and-Spin is now the interesting-looking Hideaway, filled to the brim with the bicycle courier contingent. We actually walked Dan nearly all the way to the top of the Hill, and I was flabberghasted at the variety and quantity of activity in the streets we passed. My neighborhood is a hive of activity.

Posted on by mwhybark

Main Line Berry

Just finished interviewing Frezan Ozpetek, a Turkish-Italian film director who is in town for SIFF for a couple of days. The SIFF press suite is in the W, more-or-less next to the new Seattle Public Library. In the large photo that is the most prominent element in the page that opens from the Library link in the prior sentence, I would be sitting just on the other side of the planter in the middle distance, partially occluding the “n” in the word “teens” that may be seen nearer the far wall.

Now, however, there is furniture.

I do have my camera with me but didn’t tote a means of getting the pix from imaging device to computer. I did just take a pic of this open posting window.

The open-access wireless works just fine. I will wander around in here a bit after I catch up on email. There is an ever-changing cast of laptop users, and a steady flow of neck-craning gawkers, many wearing the trademark black of the architecture students’ guild.

It should be noted that my chair is the exact same shade of tangerine as that of the old iBook that I am employing.